GROUP CHARGES STATE DEPARTMENT SECURITY CLEARANCES SUSPENDED WITHOUT DUE PROCESS, TRANSPARENCY

By William Fisher

As the US struggles to fill critical posts in its diplomatic missions overseas - including its massive new embassy in Baghdad -- the State Department is suspending the security clearances of dozens of experienced Foreign Service Officers based on flimsy allegations or bogus accusations.

This is the charge being made by an organization known as Concerned Foreign Service Officers (CFSO), which charges that security clearances often remain suspended for years, thus preventing the employee from doing the work for which he or she has been trained. CFSO is calling for an overhaul of the Department's diplomatic security management and practices.

And another State Department official says the practices of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security have turned it into "the State Department's own version of Guantanamo."

CFSO says that once a security clearance is suspended, it often takes years to complete an investigation, and most suspensions ultimately lead to revocation. "For a Foreign Service Officer, losing a security clearance is tantamount to losing a job. Diplomats with suspended clearances are given desk jobs in Washington that require little or none of their expertise and experience. Experienced officers in whom the agency has invested large amounts of training are sidelined and unavailable for use by the agency."

CFSO charges that the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) within the State Department is "increasingly misusing a poorly managed and poorly regulated security clearance process to circumvent personnel regulations, to bypass equal employment opportunity and other civil-rights laws, to avoid due process in the established discipline and suitability processes and to punish dissenters and whistleblowers within the agency."

It claims that security clearance investigations are increasingly being carried out by inexperienced personnel, thus greatly extending the period during which a diplomat with a suspended clearance is unable to do any meaningful work.

The organization adds that these "acts of diplomatic security misfeasance and incompetence threaten the national security of the United States by reducing the reliability and integrity of State Department security operations...."

Other officials at State corroborate the situation. One of them is David Firestein. During his successful candidacy for a seat on the Board of Governers of the influential American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the professional association of the US Foreign Service, Firestein wrote that the tactics at the DS Bureau are analogous to the those used at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He wrote that "... Even in the absence of a single DS allegation of wrongdoing whatsoever, the employee is nevertheless: barred from bidding (at least, in the normal sense); barred from getting an overseas posting...; barred from taking long-term training (which virtually never requires a security clearances to undertake); barred from getting promoted; barred from being considered for certain major awards; and, generally, relegated to an altogether marginal and meager professional existence. And again, this is in the absence of even one allegation of wrongdoing!"

He added that an employee whose security clearances has been suspended has "no rights during this period of professional limbo: no right to know what charge, if any, is being leveled against him; no right to know when such a charge (if there ultimately is one) will be brought against him; no right to know where the 'investigation' stands procedurally; no right to discovery or due process of any kind; no access to the grievance process; and, in many cases, no right even to see the evidence that DS is marshalling against the employee (which is often classified). And, once again, all this, in the absence of even a single allegation - let alone hard proof! - of wrongdoing on the part of the employee."

Firestein asked, "Does all this have a familiar ring to it? He wrote, "If you've followed the news out of a certain base in Cuba, it should. This is the State Department's own version of Guantanamo."

Firestein has also written: "Though we all understand that DS has a legitimate and important role to play in securing our Department, its personnel and the sensitive information those personnel are charged to handle, this bureau's documented propensity to flout Department rules and, in particular, punitively drag out clearance adjudications for many years should trouble all of us."

Firestein joined the Foreign Service in 1992, and served at US embassies in Beijing and Moscow, as well as at State's headquarters in Washington.

Many members of CFSO are victims of this process. CFSO is a group of current and former State Department employees concerned about recent abuses of the security clearance process in the department. The organization was created in 2005 to investigate, document and expose apparent misuse of the security clearance process to circumvent federal labor laws and established personnel practices.

CFSO has slightly more than 60 members, of whom about half have either had their clearances suspended or revoked. Eight of its members are retired, including two former ambassadors. The rest are State Department employees in good standing.

CFSO says it has documented "improper and coercive interview techniques, fraudulent statements in investigative reports, suppression or destruction of evidence, improper seizure of personal property, misapplication of security regulations and numerous other improprieties in DS security clearance cases."

The group charges that there are "numerous cases of security clearance suspension or revocation for minor alleged infractions bearing no relation to the security of the United States. Often the allegations leading to clearance suspension or revocation are decades old, identified or resurrected during lengthy DS fishing expeditions directed at targeted individuals."

The prevailing "get-em" culture of the DS means that "any allegation, no matter how minor, how spurious, how irrational, or however motivated, initiates an investigative process that will terminate only when an actionable derogatory charge can be identified," the group says.

Daniel Hirsch, a member of CFSO's Executive Committee, is an example. A Foreign Service Officer for 21 years, Hirsch requested an assignment in Iraq or Afghanistan in 2002. Previously he had worked in hardship posts in Africa, Central Asia and the Balkans. In 2003, DS began a security clearance investigation into Hirsch's life based on he and his wife having sought marital counseling at their last post in Turkmenistan. That counseling prompted suspicions of spousal abuse, even though his wife has repeatedly denied any such abuse in writing.

Hirsch's security clearance remains suspended while the State Department continues its investigation. Meanwhile, he is ineligible to serve in any overseas post.

Hirsch says he has been kept in the dark about the investigation's findings and possible outcome. "DS maintains that they do not even have to establish any facts in order to revoke a clearance, much less suspend one," he says.
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"I'm just waiting while my career is being destroyed."

Hirsch estimates that security clearances have been suspended at the rate of two or three per month during the past five years.

Les Hickman, a Foreign Service Officer since 1978, had his clearance suspended in November 2002, based, he says, on "allegations, nothing factual."

At that time, Hickman was the US consul in Amman, Jordan. The State Department discovered that one of his local Jordanian employees was accepting bribes to rush through the paperwork for visa applications from Iraqis, who required special screening following the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Hickman had issued instructions that all Iraqi cases be referred to him, because his junior officers did not understand the State's new instructions and were making mistakes. But because only he and the local employee had access to those applications, the State Department suspected the consul might be involved in the fraud scheme as well. His clearance was suspended, and he was relieved of his duties.

The investigation found that bribes had been taken only from Jordanians and not Iraqis, and it produced no evidence that Hickman played any part in the scheme. Hickman contended he knew nothing about it, and the Jordanian employee said he had acted alone.

But State then accused Hickman of abusing his power by forbidding anyone else in the consulate to handle the Iraqi applications.

Hickman was last interviewed by DS in June 2004, and says he cannot understand why State allows cases like his to drag on for years when critical diplomatic posts remain vacant.

Bruce Knotts, a 23-year veteran of the Foreign Service, was the deputy chief of mission in Banjul, Gambia. In February 2004, a local security guard accused him of making a sexual pass at him. "That never happened, although I am gay," Knotts says, "but the guard's story was that he refused, and I turned around and left. Nevertheless, they gave me 24 hours to leave the embassy."

Last December, DS recommended that his clearance be revoked. It denied his first appeal, and he retired in March of this year, rather than prolong the appeals process.

In an open letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Knotts recalled how the State Department once used the Cold War as an excuse to purge gay and lesbian Foreign Service Officers. He wrote:

"Since the 1980s the State Department made significant strides to promote diversity among its staff. Ironically, under your administration, at a time when the Department is publicly unveiling new initiatives allegedly aimed at further increasing diversity, the Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security has once again begun using an open-ended political war, this time the War on Terror, as a similar cover to once again attack gays, lesbians and others it doesn't like."

One of the "catch-22s" involved in DS investigations is that once a diplomat's security clearance is suspended, he or she may be unable to see the evidence that is being considered by the State Department. A second problem is that investigations are increasingly being carried out by inexperienced personnel.

The State Department says there are up to 30 security clearance suspensions every year from among the approximately 40,000 State Department employees and contractors who hold security clearances at any given time. CFSO claims there have been more than 200 security clearance suspensions over the past five years, many affecting its own members. But it adds that the number of employees with suspensions at any one time is larger than the number suspended each year, because many cases go unresolved for years.

In addition to potential abuse of the clearance system to punish dissenters and whistleblowers, CFSO says it has identified cases involving ethnic, religious, sexual orientation and other biases, use of clearance suspension to avoid due process in disciplinary cases, and serious improprieties in the investigative and adjudication processes.

"These actions, increasingly conducted by newly-hired and minimally-trained security agents, directly impact ongoing activities in every area of State Department operations and are conducted without regard to their impact on operations, resource management, national security and foreign-relations activities," the organization charges.

CFSO says the cases of primary interest to them involve a DS decision to suspend or revoke clearances of employees who have been cleared previously, and may have held a security clearance for years or decades. It contends that there are many cases where, in response to allegations of such actions as whistleblowing, expressing dissenting viewpoints, or committing minor acts of possible misfeasance unrelated to national security, DS suspends clearances in order to conduct long-term investigations -- almost always culminating in a recommendation to revoke the clearance.

Hirsch contends that State's security clearance problems began with a "massive buildup" of DS engineered by Frank Taylor, tapped by then Secretary of State Colin Powell and appointed by President Bush in 2002 as Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security and Director of the Office of Foreign Missions. Taylor, who is now a senior security officer for the General Electric Company, served as a military officer for more than 30 years.

Hirsch says Taylor "brought in a large number of untrained and inexperienced security agents, leading to a situation in which five out of every six agents have been with the Department for less than five years." Hirsch contends that Taylor and his deputy, Don Reid, "together fostered a military security mentality based on a military code of conduct that does not apply to the Foreign Service."

Today the DS is supervised by Richard J. Griffin, who has the rank of Ambassador, and who came to State from the Secret Service. Of the top leadership in DS, there is only one career officer.

The DS Bureau did not return phone calls seeking to arrange for an interview for this article.

According to Hirsch, the adjudication process is still takes far too much time. "We are aware of six cases that have been open more than four years, roughly 20 cases that have been pending more than three years, and another 20 or so currently open cases that are less than three years old. We know of eighteen cases where people have resigned rather than go through the process, and three cases where people have been fired after losing their clearances," he says.

But CFSO maintains, "There is a lot of evidence that the process is being abused as a 'special' personnel tool, to enable the agency to circumvent prohibited personnel practices. We have also noted many improprieties in other areas of the process," the organization says.

It adds, "It is easy to underestimate the pain and suffering this process causes to the subjects of this process. Nobody has been killed. Nobody has lost a limb. Nobody has been falsely imprisoned. On the other hand, people who have worked all their lives in the service of our country have lost their life's savings, have been forced to liquidate their retirement accounts or sell their family homes to pay legal fees; people who have served our country well and faithfully have been falsely branded as untrustworthy and have lost not only their jobs but also the possibility of ever getting any other job with any government agency, or with anyone who checks on the reason why they left their government careers before retirement age."

According to the CFSO, "The vast majority of victims continue their lives dramatically impoverished, and must often restart their lives from scratch, learning new skills and professions after years or decades of building a profession in what had been their chosen field. Lives have been devastated, reputations permanently destroyed, families uprooted, and marriages often destroyed in the process. The process has been described as 'a slow motion friendly-fire incident', but unlike friendly fire, which is always investigated and taken seriously, cases of security clearance abuse are never investigated, and 'national security' or 'the employee's privacy' is inevitably invoked as a means of hiding the truth. Even when criminal actions have been demonstrated in the processing of individual cases, no DS agent has ever been disciplined or held accountable for such actions."

In addition to potential abuse of the clearance system to punish dissenters and whistleblowers, CFSO claims it has identified cases involving ethnic, religious, sexual orientation and other biases, use of clearance suspension to avoid due process in disciplinary cases, and serious improprieties in the investigative and adjudication processes."

The organization says that four out of every six DS agents is new. "The State Department provides them a brief orientation course -- and basic training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco Ga. where they learn generalized professional skills preparing them to 'develop a case, write and execute search warrants, write a criminal complaint, obtain an indictment, arrest a defendant, and testify in a suppression hearing', but does not train them in the specialized knowledge needed to conduct unbiased background investigations in a complex overseas setting," the CFSO says, adding:

"It is as if the State Department were to send out consular officers who had been fully trained to use the consular computer systems and visa machines, but not trained either in the Immigration and Naturalization Act, nor in the culture/economics of the region or country of service). Their background prepares them to conduct focused investigations aimed at criminal cases, not objective, unbiased collection of data for clearance adjudication."

AFSA's Foreign Affairs Council, an influential non-partisan umbrella group of 11 organizations concerned about US diplomatic readiness, concurs. In a report, the Council charged that "Serious due-process problems plague a number of officers whose security clearances have been suspended. It usually takes several years for DS to decide whether to revoke the clearance or not. During these years the officers languish in make-work positions. For reasons related to both managerial efficiency and humane treatment of employees, this security clearance revocation process needs a much higher priority and a much shorter duration."

Truthout asked a senior State Department official about the motivation of DS Bureau personnel. Speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss this subject publicly, he said, "The DS Bureau is the most conservative of all bureaus at State. The Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) envisages that, in normal cases, the maximum duration of security clearance suspensions should be 90 days. But DS consistently flouts the Department's rules and is rarely challenged. It has created its own subculture.

"To those responsible for investigating 'wrongdoing' by suspending security clearances, the basic mentality is that a Foreign Service Officer overseas talking with any foreigner is suspect - even though these contacts are an essential part of their responsibilities. And once a security clearance is suspended, it is simply safer to leave it suspended - often for years.

"The reason is that decision to revoke a security clearance gives the aggrieved employee some real rights for the first time in the process. He or she can question the basis for the suspension, demand to see DS's evidence, confront his or her accuser, if there is one, and begin a formal appeals process. If that process results in a DS decision being reversed, DS is left with egg on its face. So it's a lot safer just to leave the employee in limbo."

He added, "These are the kinds of tactics we would expect to find in a dictatorship or in a police state, not in a service dedicated to introducing transparency into such governments. It is a travesty that this is happening to so many of our dedicated public servants."

RIGHTS GROUPS REPORT ON GHOST PRISONERS

By William Fisher

Six prominent human rights groups are charging that US authorities are secretly holding 39 terror suspects. One of the groups, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, has filed a lawsuit in US federal court demanding the disclosure of information concerning disappeared detainees, including ghost detainees and unregistered prisoners

"What we're asking is where are these 39 people now, and what's happened to them since they 'disappeared'?" said Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch, one of the organizations in the coalition. .

The new report, titled "Off the Record: U.S. Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the 'War on Terror' -- reveals the names of "the disappeared" - some for the first time. The organizations said their information was based on interviews with former prisoners and officials in the US, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) declined to comment specifically about the report, but a spokesman said, "We act in strict accord with American law, and... our counterterror initiatives -- which are subject to careful review and oversight -- have been very effective in disrupting plots and saving lives."

The spokesman added, "The United States does not conduct or condone torture."

The report acknowledged that information on the missing detainees was incomplete in some cases.

For example, some detainees had been added to the list after Marwan Jabour, an Islamic militant who claims to have spent two years in CIA custody, recalled being shown photos of them during interrogations, the report said. It added that others were identified only by their first or last names, such as "al-Rubaia," who was added to the list after a fellow inmate reported seeing the name scribbled
onto the wall of his cell.

But coalition spokespersons said information on at least 21 of the detainees had been confirmed by two or more independent sources.

President Bush acknowledged the existence of secret detention centers in September 2006, after The Washington Post newspaper revealed their existence. But the President said that the prisons were then empty, adding that 14 terrorism suspects the CIA had been holding, including the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, had been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay for trials.

The Post's article, whose authors were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2007, did not identify the locations of the secret prisons, but it has been widely reported that the so-called "black sites" were in former USSR-client countries in Eastern Europe.

But a spokesperson for the human rights coalition said she wasn't convinced the sites were ever emptied, and claimed a program of secret detentions was ongoing.

She said, "We wanted (the detainees') names in the public eye because of the impression that this is over, this is finished, and they're not doing this anymore.
That's clearly not the case."

Detainees on the list include Hassan Ghul and Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi
al-Ghamdi, both of whom were named in the 9/11 Commission report as al-Qaida
operatives.

Another is Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a jihadist ideologue who has been named as one of the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists." US officials have confirmed that Nasar was seized in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta in November 2005, and the activists' report said that he was taken into US custody after his arrest, citing unnamed Pakistani officials. His current location is unknown.

Also missing is Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman, the son of the Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheik" behind the first plot against the World Trade Center in New York, the report said.

Most of the 35 other detainees mentioned in the report have been previously
identified, with the exception of four Libyans, who are alleged to be members of the al-Qaida-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

The report says they were handed to US authorities and have not been heard
from since.

It also highlights aspects of the CIA detention program that it claims the US government has actively tried to conceal, such as the locations where prisoners may have been held, the mistreatment they endured, the countries to which they may have been transferred for proxy detention, and the detention and abuse of spouses and children to gain information.

The other groups involved in preparing the report are the Center for
Constitutional Rights in New York, Amnesty, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University's School of Law, Human Rights Watch, all based in the US, and Reprieve and Cageprisoners, both based in the UK.

The issue of "ghost prisoners" has been a consistent source of criticism of the Bush Administration's detention policies and practices by the human rights and legal communities since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

The Administration denied it was holding "ghost prisoners", but during a 2004 press briefing, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disclosed for the first time that, in response to a personal request from then CIA director George Tenet, he had instructed the US military to hold a prisoner at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison without recording his name.

This practice is banned by the terms of the Geneva Conventions and was fiercely criticized at the time by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is supposed to have identification of and access to all detainees.

The CCR lawsuit, filed after the government refused to comply with several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, seeks documents that provide information about government authorization of secret detention and extraordinary rendition policies and practices, the involvement of private contractors and non-governmental actors, the location of the prisons and identity of the prisoners, the types of interrogation methods used at the sites, and injuries suffered by detainees.

In a related development, the Italian Government opened the trial of 33 suspected US and Italian intelligence agents for allegedly kidnapping an Egyptian cleric.

Twenty-five suspected CIA operatives, a US military officer, Italy's former spy chief, Nicolo Pollari, and six other Italians, are accused of kidnapping Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr in 2003. The case is the first over a practice called extraordinary rendition, in which the US sends suspected terrorists to other countries without trial.

The US Government says it will not extradite the Americans allegedly involved to Italy to stand trial.

Defense lawyers have asked the Milan judge hearing the case to delay proceedings pending a ruling from Italy's constitutional court. Judge Oscar Magi said he will rule on June 18, the trial's next meeting date, whether to proceed with the case or wait for the high court to determine if documents and testimony used as evidence are covered by state secrecy rules.

The defendants are accused by prosecutors of involvement in the abduction of Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. The cleric was flown to Egypt and tortured during questioning, prosecutors say.

Meanwhile, The Bush Administration's attempts to invent a new legal system for holding and trying terrorism suspects suffered another setback, when war crimes charges against two al-Qaeda suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison were dismissed by two different military judges.

The judges ruled that the Administration had not legally established that the accused were "unlawful enemy combatants" and thus subject to trial by Guantanamo's military commissions. More than five years after President Bush rejected the Geneva Conventions and the US court-martial system for handling al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, the first trial of a detainee once again has been put off indefinitely.

The judges' decisions opened the way for Congress to revisit the Military Commission Act, hurriedly passed in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled that the Administration had no authority to hold prisoners in the absence of a basis in law.

The Administration's latest difficulty stems from the fact that the two men it
was trying to put on trial, Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Omar Khadr, had been judged by Guantanamo's parallel system of Combatant Status Review Tribunals to be "enemy combatants" only, without the designation "unlawful."

Capt. Keith J. Allred, one of the military judges, ruled that Hamdan had
never received "an individualized determination" that he was an unlawful
combatant, as required under Geneva. Without that, detainees are entitled to be
treated as prisoners of war. The judge also found that the standard for "enemy
combatant" used by the status tribunals was broader than that for "unlawful
combatant" as established by Congress for purposes of the military commissions.

Congress is currently considering two new pieces of legislation to mitigate the legal quagmire at Guantanamo. One, already voted out favorably by the Senate Judiciary Committee under the bipartisan sponsorship of Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Patrick Leahy, (D-Vt.), would restore the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo prisoners, allowing them to appeal their detentions to US federal courts.

The other, which has been attached to the Senate's version of the annual defense authorization bill by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), would reform the tribunal process at Guantanamo by requiring that detainees be represented by lawyers and have access to the evidence against them. The measure would also curtail the use of evidence obtained by coercion and require that the tribunals
be headed by judges.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" program Sunday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said he thought Guantanamo should be closed immediately and its remaining approximately 380 prisoners detained and tried either through the courts martial process or through regular civilian courts.

President Bush has also said he would like to see Guantanamo closed, but has thus far taken no action to do so.

GOODLING PAINTS HERSELF AS UNDERLING WHO CROSSED THE LINE

By William Fisher

Former Justice Department White House Liaison Monica Goodling told the House Judiciary Committee today that she never discussed the firings of eight US Attorneys with Karl Rove or Harriet Miers, never recommended additions to or deletions from the list of political appointees to be terminated, did not know who compiled the list, but admitted she “may have gone too far” in questioning prospective career applicants about their political affiliations.

In a hearing room that appeared to contain almost as many media representatives as audience members, Goodling said she “may have asked inappropriate political questions” of applicants for civil service posts at the Department of Justice in an effort to implement the priorities of the Bush Administration.

She said, “I crossed the line” with regard to applicants for civil service positions, “but I didn’t mean to.” She added that she simply “wanted to make sure” that job applicants were “ideologically compatible” with the Administration. She said her interviews with job applicants often included questions about who they voted for in the 2004 election.

Goodling told the Committee that Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who resigned earlier this month, may have misled Congress in his Senate testimony earlier this month by omitting facts she had presented to him.

She also asserted that she believed that the central role in the forced resignations of the eight US Attorneys (USAs) was played by Kyle Sampson, who resigned as Chief of Staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales after the firestorm caused by the USA terminations.

Goodling was accompanied at the hearing by three of her attorneys, led by high-profile Washington lawyer John Dowd. Dowd has said Congressional Democrats had already made up their minds about his client's role in the firings.

Goodling originally refused to testify, invoking her Fifth Amendment rights under the Constitution to avoid the possibility of incriminating herself. The House Committee eventually granted her immunity, opening the way for today’s testimony.

The firings of the US Attorneys became one of Washington’s hottest political issues after earlier testimony in which former Deputy Attorney General McNulty told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the terminations were based on “performance-related” issues.

That testimony was later contradicted by AG Gonzales, who apologized to Senators for what he characterized as the mishandling of the affair but insisted that the President has the right to name political appointees who are committed to carrying out the Administration’s agenda.

Many legislators said they have been troubled by the manner in which the USAs were asked for their resignations, and also by charges that Administration officials may have broken the law by applying political litmus tests to prospective non-political job applicants, who would be covered by the protections of laws governing the Civil Service.

These legislators, mostly Democrats but a few Republicans as well, have been trying to trace these issues back to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, the President’s chief political advisor, and to then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers. Congress has issued subpoenas demanding testimony and documents from Rove, but the White House has refused, invoking “executive privilege” in what could become a case headed for a long court battle.

A key question in the Rove-Miers issue is whether either official sent or received emails using an account belonging to the Republican National Committee, rather than the White House. If they did so, it could be a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which mandates the preservation of all communications involving White House employees.

The White House has admitted that some officials did in fact use RNC email accounts for political, non-official, communications, and has acknowledged that a number of such emails appear to be missing.

In her testimony today, Goodling repeatedly portrayed herself as an implementer of policies crafted by more senior officials. She said lacked the authority to carry out her own decisions, and said her principal role was to make recommendations to others.

In one case, however, she acknowledged delaying the appointment of a prospective career prosecutor sought by Jeffrey A. Taylor, interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, reportedly because the candidate was too "liberal" for the nonpolitical position.

The candidate was Seth Adam Meinero, a Howard University law school graduate who had worked on civil rights cases at the Environmental Protection Agency and had served as a special assistant prosecutor in Taylor's office.

Meinero was eventually hired at Taylor's insistence, but the issue led to
a Justice Department investigation of whether Goodling improperly weighed
political affiliation in her reviews of applicants for non-political positions.
In another case, according to emails and other documents obtained by Congress, Goodling also played a central role in arranging for the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Republican National Committee official and aide to Rove, as the US attorney in Little Rock.

She also met last summer with two New Mexico Republicans who complained
about then-US Attorney David C. Iglesias, who was later fired. In another
case, she single-handedly blocked the dismissal of a North Carolina prosecutor
who for more than a year had been on the list of candidates to be fired.

Goodling’s critics have described her as a divisive figure at the Justice Department since her arrival in 2002, with a reputation for a mercurial temperament and having “sharp elbows” in her dealings with career employees.

Goodling and former AG Chief of Staff Sampson "knew politics, not law," said Bruce Fein, who served as a senior Justice official during the Reagan Administration. "This extent [of] neophytes running the department is highly irregular," he added.

Goodlng is a 1999 graduate of Regent University law school in Virginia Beach. Regent, which describes itself as a “Christian university,” was founded by evangelist Pat Robertson. The university’s website claims that 150 of its students have served in the Bush Administration. Goodling told the Committee today that she attended a Christian university “because I wanted to obtain justice through public service.”

Goodling, who has six months of prosecutorial experience, was one of a small group of young aides to AG Gonzales, to whom he reportedly granted extensive authority and autonomy in their dealings with seasoned Justice Department lawyers.

According to the transcript of an interview with a staffer from the House
Judiciary Committee, Goodling is said to have told a senior Justice official shortly before she quit, "All I ever wanted to do was serve this president, this administration, this department."

The furor over the leadership of the Department of Justice has caused Senate Democrats, joined by a few Republicans, to push for passage of a resolution demanding Gonzales’ resignation. Such a resolution would merely express the “sense of the Senate” and would have no standing in law, since the President is always free to hire and fire Executive Branch officials to whom he gives political appointments.

President Bush, whose relationship with Gonzales dates back to Bush’s campaign for Governor of Texas, has said the Attorney General has his complete confidence.

GOP HOPEFULS HEAR APPLAUSE FOR MORE "ENHANCED INTERROGATION"

By William Fisher

Despite the view of scores of senior military intelligence officers who contend that "torture doesn't work," the audience at last week's Republican presidential candidate debate broke into applause when leading candidates endorsed increased use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

The one notable exception was Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese for eight years and experienced torture first hand. His disavowal was greeted with silence from the predominantly conservative South Carolina audience.

The views of the ten candidates for the GOP presidential nomination came in response to a scenario presented by Fox News anchor Brit Hume, in which three American shopping malls had been bombed, resulting in scores of casualties, and terrorists with detailed knowledge of another imminent and deadlier attack had been captured and taken to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The question was, "How far can the authorities go in interrogating the terrorists to get information to avert a fourth attack?"

The most vehement champions of "enhanced interrogation" were the two men considered, along with McCain, to be front-runners in the nomination contest, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Giuliani said he would back "every method" short of torture that interrogators could think of because "I don't want to see another 3,000 people dead in New York or any place else."

Romney said he would support "not torture but enhanced interrogation techniques." Romney also said he wanted the Guantanamo Bay detention center doubled in size.

In contrast, McCain said he would not resort to torture because the United States would lose more in world opinion than it would gain in information.

"When I was in Vietnam, one of the things that sustained us, as we went - underwent torture ourselves - is the knowledge that if we had our positions reversed and we were the captors, we would not impose that kind of treatment on them," McCain said. "It's not about the terrorists, it's about us. It's
about what kind of country we are."

"Enhanced interrogation," a phrase frequently used and endorsed by President George W. Bush, refers to techniques prohibited by the Army's code of justice and the Geneva Conventions. One of these is known as water-boarding, where a prisoner is strapped down, head beneath his feet, as water is poured repeatedly on a cloth covering the mouth until the person thinks he is about to drown.

While the putative front-runners appeared to be competing for the machismo award, the use of "enhanced interrogation" was also endorsed by others who are considered dark horses in the nomination race.

For example, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, told the audience, "Well, let me just say that it's almost unbelievable to listen to this in a way. We're talking about -- we're talking about it in such a theoretical fashion. You say that -- that nuclear devices have gone off in the United States, more are planned, and we're wondering about whether waterboarding would be a -- a bad thing to do? I'm looking for 'Jack Bauer' at that time, let me tell you."

Tancredo's remark was greeted with laughter and applause. His reference was to the controversial television series, "24", in which the protagonist hero is an intelligence agent named Jack Bauer, who freely uses super-aggressive interrogation techniques to obtain information.

Tancredo added, "And -- and there is -- there is nothing -- if you are talking about -- I mean, we are the last best hope of Western civilization. And so all of the theories that go behind our activities subsequent to these nuclear attacks going off in the United States, they go out the window because when -- when we go under, Western civilization goes under. So you better take that into account, and you better do every single thing you can as president of the United States to make sure, number one, it doesn't happen -- that's right -- but number two, you better respond in a way that makes them fearful of you because otherwise you guarantee something like this will happen."

Debate moderator Hume then said, "Let me enrich the scenario just a little bit. Let's assume for the sake of discussion here that we now also have additional intelligence that indicates with high certainty that the attackers were trained in a West African country hostile to the United States, in camps openly run by the terrorist organization that sent them. What kind of response would you agree to for that?"

Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, the superhawk former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, responded with a statement that was greeted with laughter. "Yeah, let me just say this would take a one-minute conversation with the secretary of Defense. I would call him up or call him in. I would say to SECDEF, in terms of getting information that would save American lives, even if it involves very high-pressure techniques, one sentence: Get the information. Have it back within an hour, and let's act on it. Let's execute with Special Operations or whoever else is necessary, and I will take full responsibility. Get the information," he said.

Hunter has been an outspoken champion of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, even calling a Washington news conference to show the press the "five-star cuisine" given the prisoners there.

Presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin and Secretary of Health and Human Services in President Bush's first term, had this to say:

"I would do the first thing that President Ronald Reagan would say: Trust but verify. Verify that that information is correct. And I would go in with all the power necessary. Colin Powell said, and I quote him, he says, 'If in fact you're going to war, have a reason to go to war. Make sure you go with all the force necessary in order to do so, and have an exit strategy.' If there's a country in Africa that is not friendly to America, that is anti-America and is promoting terrorism, and those terrorists are going to attack, it's -- be incumbent on all of us to make sure that we do what is right. The president of the United States has got to lead that effort, and if it's necessary, it's got to take those camps out as deliberately and as methodically as possible, as long as that information is credible and can be checked and make sure that it is accurate."

Hume asked Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, "If the decision were up to you, would you do that? And if so, would you decide to go to the United Nations, for example, first to seek some kind of international authorization to do it or would you just move in the way that Governor Thompson described?"

Said Brownback: "I would not go to the United Nations in the situation you've described. You've described a situation where American lives have been lost and we think more are pending to lose. And I think your real question you have to have here as the chief executive, as the leader of the country, what are you measuring here? Is your primary concern U.S. lives or is it how you're going to be perceived in the world? And my standard is U.S. lives, and I'm going to do everything within my power to protect U.S. lives, period."

Brownback added, "I will do it. I'll move aggressively forward on it. If we have to later ask and say, "Well, it shouldn't quite have been done this way or that way," that's the way it is. But the standard must be protection of U.S. lives. That's the job of president of the United States, and I would take it seriously, and I would do it."

Romney's response was, "Yeah, first of all, let's make sure that we understand that the key in electing the next president is to find somebody who will make sure that that scenario doesn't ever happen, and the key to that is prevention. We've all spent a lot of time talking about what happens after the bomb goes off. The real question is, how do you prevent the bomb from going off? And that's what I spent my time doing as a governor over the last four years, and serving on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. And that means intelligence and counterterrorism."

He continued. "Now we're going to -- you said the person's going to be in Guantanamo. I'm glad they're at Guantanamo. I don't want them on our soil. I want them on Guantanamo, where they don't get the access to lawyers they get when they're on our soil. I don't want them in our prisons. I want them there. Some people have said, we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo. We ought to make sure that the terrorists -- (applause) -- and there's no question but that in a setting like that where you have a ticking bomb that the president of the United States -- not the CIA interrogator, the president of the United States -- has to make the call. And enhanced interrogation techniques have to be used -- not torture but enhanced interrogation techniques, yes."

President Bush has said he would like to close Guantanamo, but claims he cannot find countries prepared to take prisoners scheduled for release or facilities to detain those who are not.

None of the contenders defined "enhanced interrogation techniques," but those in favor appeared to endorse waterboarding as one such technique.

Hume then addressed Giuliani, saying, "The former director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, (and) the current head of the CIA have both said that the most valuable intelligence tool they have had has been the information gained from what are called enhanced interrogation techniques to include, presumably, waterboarding. What is your view whether such techniques should be applied in a scenario like the one I described?"

There then followed this exchange:

GIULIANI: In the hypothetical that you gave me, which assumes that we know there's going to be another attack and these people know about it, I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they could think of. It shouldn't be torture, but every method they can think of --

HUME: Waterboarding?

GIULIANI: -- and I would -- and I would -- well, I'd say every method they could think of, and I would support them in doing that because I've seen what -- (interrupted by applause) -- I've seen what can happen when you make a mistake about this, and I don't want to see another 3,000 people dead in New York or any place else.

The contenders all reiterated their support of the war in Iraq. Said McCain: "We must succeed, and we cannot fail, and I will be the last man standing if necessary."

Their agreement on this issue appeared to underscore South Carolina's importance in the party's nominating process. It is the third state in the nation to hold a primary, and it is also the state that destroyed McCain's run for the presidency in 2000. He lost to then-Governor Bush, after winning the New Hampshire primary.

Hume asked McCain if he thought techniques such as waterboarding qualified as torture.

McCain responded, "Yes, and the interesting thing about that aspect is that during the debate, when we had the detainee treatment act, there was a sharp division between those who had served in the military and those who hadn't. Virtually every senior officer, retired or active- duty, starting with Colin Powell,(Presidential Medal of Honor winner) General (John W.) Vessey and everyone else, agreed with my position that we should not torture people. One of the reasons is, is because if we do it, what happens to our military people when they're captured? And also, they realize there's more to war than the battlefield."

McCain went on: "So yes, literally every retired military person and active duty military person who has actually been in battle and served for extended times in the military -- supported my position, and I'm glad of it...It's about us as a nation. We have procedures for interrogation in the Army Field Manual. Those, I think, would be adequate in 999,999 of cases, and I think that if we agree to torture people, we will do ourselves great harm in the world."

Hume then directed a question at former Virginia Governor James S. Gilmore. "This kind of attack would pose immediate and obvious problems for the U.S. economy -- they've hit shopping centers. What kind of measures would you take, Governor Gilmore, to assure that the U.S. economy continued to grow in the face of an attack of this kind?"

Gilmore said, "I actually had to deal with this issue. I was the governor of the state of Virginia during the 9/11 attack. The Pentagon was in fact struck; it's in Arlington, Virginia. But before that time, I'd been asked by the United States government to chair the National Commission on Terrorism and Homeland Security. We issued two reports. Before the 9/11 attack, the third one was complete. We did two more after that. So I have the experience to deal with these issues, and I've done a lot of scenarios like this.

Apparently unsatisfied, Hume pressed, "Well what would you do?"

Gilmore responded, "Well, with respect to the United Nations, first of all let me say that I would go to the U.N., but it would be to state an opinion and to take advantage of our rights on an international law, not to go ask for permission. And then I would go in, after having explained exactly what we were doing to the world and asking for world support, but even without it, we would go in and act decisively against that. Meanwhile, with respect to homeland security, we've got to put a system in place that talks about a complete partnership and community of preparedness between federal, state and local people, private sector community leadership, and that particularly means information sharing between federal, state and local authorities, something we said as early as the year 1999. And if you do that, I believe from my experience as prosecutor and attorney general, that you can get this information -- and then find ways to protect the country even in a shopping center."

Former Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas addressed the subject of economic changes that might have to be made after a terrorist attack. He said, "One of the things that happened after 9/11, the president told us essentially that we all needed to get back on airplanes and fly, we all needed to go back to shopping centers and shop, we need to go ahead and travel. And I understand what he meant by that -- to put our economy back in motion. And I think that was a good thing to say, but it may have been interpreted by the American people as business as usual. The problem is, it'll never ever be business as usual when you attack innocent Americans on our soil. It can't be business as usual. We've got to make a different kind of business -- go after those who murdered -- and let's use the word "murder" -- murdered fellow American citizens, then let's make sure that we do more than simply protect our borders and bring justice to those who did it; but that we ask the American people to join together in a sacrifice, the same kind of sacrifice that we had when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, the same kind of sacrifice that we've been called upon as a nation repeatedly to do. That's what America would have to do.

Another dark horse, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, weighed in on the same question, saying, "Well, the lower the taxes the better, and I think cutting taxes would be beneficial. But we should find places where we could cut spending as well, because eventually a deficit can be very, very harmful to us. But you know, I think it's interesting talking about torture here in that it's become enhanced interrogation technique. It sounds like Newspeak. Nobody's for the torture, and I think that's important. But as far as taking care of a problem like this, the president has the authority to do that. If we're under imminent attack, the president can take that upon himself to do it. But just think. We gave the president authority to go into Afghanistan, and here we have Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. They have nuclear weapons, and we're giving them money. And we forgot about him, and now we're over in -- in Iraq in a war that's bogging us down, and we have forgotten against -- about dealing with the people that attacked us. And here you have a hypothetical attack that you're dealing with; we ought to be dealing with the one we have right now on our hands."

Earlier in the debate, Paul gave Giuliani what developed into a major opportunity when he appeared to suggest that the US invited the attacks of Sept. 11 by having originally invaded Iraq.

"May I comment on that?" asked a grim-faced Giuliani. "That's really an extraordinary statement. That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11."

Giuliani was greeted by cheers and applause.

While all the major GOP presidential prospects save McCain were eager to trumpet their support of aggressive interrogation techniques, most military and counter-terrorism authorities have taken a contrary view.

The most recent came on the same day as the South Carolina debate. In a Washington Post Op-ed, retired Marine Corps Commandant Charles C. Krulak and retired four-star Marine General Joseph P. Hoar, wrote:

"Fear can be a strong motivator. It led Franklin Roosevelt to intern tens of thousands of innocent U.S. citizens during World War II; it led to Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt, which ruined the lives of hundreds of Americans. And it led the United States to adopt a policy at the highest levels that condoned and even authorized torture of prisoners in our custody.

"Fear is the justification offered for this policy by former CIA director George Tenet as he promotes his new book. Tenet oversaw the secret CIA interrogation
program in which torture techniques euphemistically called 'waterboarding', 'sensory deprivation', 'sleep deprivation' and 'stress positions' -- conduct we used to call war crimes -- were used. In defending these abuses, Tenet revealed: 'Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through: the palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know'."

That view is shared by most members of the military who have intelligence experience. These include former secretary of state Colin Powell, who wrote a public letter to McCain opposing Bush's detention policies. "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," Powell observed. "To redefine common article 3 [of the Geneva convention] would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk."

Powell's letter came amid the 2005 battle between the Bush Administration and some members of the Senate to stop the president's bid to legalize torture and ad hoc military tribunals. That effort was thwarted, not by Democrats, but by four key Republican senators: McCain John Warner of Virginia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine.

Their success culminated in passage of the Detainee Treatment Act, which the president signed into law, but simultaneously nullified by issuing a "signing statement" saying, in effect, he would obey the law unless he thought national security was at stake.

The result of a so-called compromise between Bush and the four senators, the president had barely announced the deal before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear that the administration would define torture any way it liked. He said on CNN that torture meant the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental harm, and repeated the word "severe" twice. He would not say whether that included "waterboarding."

WHISTLEBLOWERS CHARGE RETALIATION, SEEK ADDITIONAL PROTECTIONS

By William Fisher

Career Federal employees who report waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government agencies are routinely subjected to career-ending retaliation, humiliation, and legal costs – despite laws that are supposed to protect them, and repeated assurances from the White House, many government agencies, and congress that they maintain a policy of zero tolerance for retaliation.

These are some of the conclusions of public interest organizations that monitor the Federal bureaucracy. They say the incidence of retaliation has increased exponentially during the administration of President George W. Bush, and are calling on Congress to strengthen legal protections for whistleblowers.

As more than 40 public interest groups marked “Washington Whistleblowers Week” -- a week-long gathering of whistleblowers from throughout the country in Washington, D.C., to share their stories with Congress and the public – Joan Claybrook, president of advocacy group Public Citizen, said, “Whistleblowers are crucial to the health of democracy and need stronger protections from Congress against retaliation.”

Some of the victims of retaliation for whistleblowing are well known. Perhaps the most highly publicized is Sibel Edmonds. Ms. Edmonds began working for the FBI shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, translating top-secret documents pertaining to suspected terrorists. She was fired in the spring of 2002 after reporting concerns about sabotage, intimidation, corruption and incompetence to superiors. The Department of Justice Inspector General agreed with Edmunds’ charges.

But in October 2002, at the request of FBI Director Robert Mueller, then Attorney General John Ashcroft imposed a gag order on Edmonds, citing possible damage to diplomatic relations or national security. Edmonds sued the FBI, but the government invoked the so-called “state secrets privilege” – a previously rarely used legal maneuver that has been used numerous times during the Bush Administration. Edmunds appealed her case all the way to the Supreme Court. But the high court agreed with lower courts that trying her case would compromise “state secrets”. Edmunds organized an advocacy group, The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, to lobby for greater protections for employees in agencies dealing with national security (www.nswbc.org/).

Other whistleblowers who have paid a high price for coming forward are less well known.

For example:

Bunnatine H. "Bunny" Greenhouse, the senior contracting officer for the Army Corps of Engineers, who objected - first, internally, then publicly - to a multi-billion dollar, no-bid contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq. She was removed from the senior executive service, the top rank of civilian government employees, because of “poor performance reviews.” But Green says the performance review "was conducted by the very subjects" of her allegations. Greenhouse went public with her concerns over the volume of Iraq-related work given to Halliburton by the Army Corps of Engineers without competition. Previously, her complaints within the agency having been ignored, she started giving interviews to national publications, and testified before a Democrat-sponsored Capitol Hill event on contracting in Iraq.

Army Specialist Samuel Provance said he was demoted and humiliated after telling a general investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal that senior officers had covered up detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib. He said he tried to tell the general “things he didn’t want to hear”, adding, "Young soldiers were scapegoated while superiors misrepresented what had happened and tried to misdirect attention away from what was really going on". Provance lost his security clearance, was placed under a “gag order”, and is now stationed in Germany, where his responsibilities consist of "picking up trash and guard duty.”

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer was among the first to disclose the Pentagon's “Able Danger” data-mining program. He said he believes that the program identified Mohammed Atta before he became the lead hijacker in the 2001 terrorist attacks, though a Pentagon review found no evidence to support that conclusion. Shaffer’s security clearance was revoked.

Russell Tice, a former intelligence officer at the National Security Agency (NSA), charged that there were "illegalities and unconstitutional activity" in the agency’s so-called ‘special-access programs’ but was advised that he could not discuss them even with members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in closed session. He told the Committee the Defense Department’s harassment of him included spreading rumors that he suffers from bipolar disease.

Mike German resigned as an FBI agent after reporting that other agents and managers mishandled a major counterterrorism case in 2002 and falsified records. The Justice Department inspector general confirmed German's allegations, and that he was retaliated against – his security clearance was revoked.

Richard Levernier's job as a senior Department of Energy nuclear security specialist was to test how well prepared America's nuclear weapons sites were to defend against a terrorist attack. He testified that the tests he supervised showed a 50 percent failure rate. When he reported this to his superiors, he was demoted and his security clearance revoked. He says he was forced into early retirement.
During the Bush Administration, the suppression or manipulation of science for political or ideological reasons has become a frequent whistleblower complaint.

For example, earlier this month the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) (www.ucsusa.org/) told Congress that politics was trumping science at the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), part of the Interior Department (DI). Their allegation came on the heels of a scathing report from the DI’s Interior Inspector General that chastised former Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie MacDonald for distorting FWS scientific documents to prevent the protection of several highly imperiled species. MacDonald resigned her post last week.

Francesca Grifo, director of the UCS Scientific Integrity Program, is quick to point out that MacDonald's case is just one of many. The misuse of science at Interior has been reported on issues as diverse as mountaintop removal, cattle grazing, and the protection of trumpeter swans.

She called on Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to “send a clear message to all Interior political appointees that substituting opinions for fact is unacceptable."

Grifo testified that political interference in science “has become epidemic—not only at FWS, but at agencies throughout the federal government.”

While there have been a number of whistleblower complaints from career government scientists, many have been intimidated into silence, and others have quietly left the public sector.

Agencies that deal with the climate change issue have been under extraordinary scrutiny by public interest groups who charge that the findings of government scientists have been routinely suppressed or distorted by Bush Administration political appointees.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP), (www.whistleblower.org/) a public interest group, recently issued a report – “Redacting the Science of Climate Change” -- on the findings of a year-long investigation into political interference at federal climate science agencies.

GAP says the report “demonstrates how policies and practices have increasingly restricted the flow of scientific information emerging from publicly-funded climate change research. This has negatively affected the media’s ability to report objectively on scientific issues, public officials’ capacity to respond with appropriate policies, and full public understanding of environmental concerns."

Science relating to public health issues has also been under severe scrutiny. Emblematic of this problem was the resignation of Dr. Susan Wood, who quit her post as assistant commissioner of women's health at the Food and Drug Administration in protest against the FDA’s long delay in approving the so-called Plan B emergency contraception medication for over-the-counter sale despite the recommendations of agency scientists and outside review panels. Dr. Wood chose to resign after repeated unsuccessful attempts to make her objections heard within the FDA.

Dr. Wood charges that federal health agencies “seem increasingly unable to operate independently and that this lack of independence compromises their mission of promoting public health and welfare.” She added, “Whether it is the environment, energy policy, science education or public health, the American public expects our government to make the best decisions based on the best available evidence.”

“Having spent 15 years working for the federal government, nearly five of which
were at the FDA, I care deeply about what's happening in the federal agencies,
particularly our health agencies. Nearly 25 cents of every consumer dollar is
spent on products regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. We count on the FDA for the safety and effectiveness of our medicines, vaccines and medical
devices, and for the safety of the blood and food supply. The American public
does not want to -- nor should it -- have to think twice about the quality and
reliability of information it is getting from the FDA. Its reputation as the
international gold standard for regulatory agencies, and as a body that sets the
bar very high when it comes to scientific evidence and integrity, is being put
at risk over adult access to contraception. Why would the administration risk
such a reputation over this?”

Many federal employees say they have often found the protections theoretically afforded to them within the Executive Branch of government to be inadequate. These protections are intended to include statements to their immediate supervisors, the Inspectors General that reside within virtually all government departments, and the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an independent agency dedicated to ensuring that whistleblowers do not suffer retaliation.

But the OSC, led by Bush political appointee Scott Bloch, has itself come under heavy fire from public interest groups, not only for failing to protect whistleblowers from a variety of Federal agencies, but practicing retaliation against its own employees. Since 2005, Bloch has been under investigation by the Inspector General of the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM), at the behest of the President’s Office of Management and Budget. OPM’s investigation centers on charges that Bloch retaliated against whistleblowers who complained they were being transferred out of Washington for political reasons because they disagreed with Bloch’s policies. That investigation is reportedly reaching its final stages.

The Administration’s investigation of Bloch comes as a result of a complaint filed by his own staff members and whistleblower groups alleging a host of misconduct charges against Bloch.

Bloch insists that the ‘forced removals’ were part of a reorganization that sent 12 career OSC employees to new assignments in other cities “to improve performance, not punish any employees.”

The OPM Inspector General’s investigation is the third probe into Bloch’s operation after less than two years in office. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and a US Senate subcommittee both have ongoing investigations into mass dismissal of hundreds of whistleblower cases, crony hires, and Bloch’s targeting of gay employees for removal while refusing to investigate cases involving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The allegation was made by in 2005 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), (www.peer.org/), which said figures released by Bloch reveal that in the previous year OSC dismissed or otherwise disposed of 600 whistleblower disclosures where civil servants have reported waste, fraud, threats to public safety and violations of law, and “made 470 claims of retaliation disappear”.

PEER’S Jeff Ruch says, “The 600 disclosure cases that Bloch has admitted were dismissed are all instances where civil servants came forward to report waste, fraud and abuse, yet OSC decided that there was no need to investigate.”

He added, “Dismissing all 600 cases and deciding that not one deserved investigation (because, in the words of the OSC spokesperson they were all ("minor matters or issues previously investigated") stretches credulity.”

“Bloch has yet to announce a single case where he has ordered an investigation into the employee’s charges”, PEER charges. The organization says, “in not one of these cases did Bloch’s office affirmatively represent a whistleblower to obtain relief before the civil service court system”, called the Merit Systems Protection Board.

PEER says, “In order to speed dismissals, Bloch instituted a rule forbidding his staff from contacting a whistleblower if their disclosure was deemed incomplete or ambiguous. Instead, OSC would simply dismiss the matter. As a result, hundreds of whistleblowers never had a chance to justify why their cases had merit.”

Whistleblowers are supposed to be protected by the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). But a series of court rulings since 1994 has weakened the safeguards Congress intended in making it extremely difficult for whistleblowers to protect themselves when they speak out to protect the public.

Public Citizen’s Claybrook is calling for support of bills currently in Congress that would remedy the situation by strengthening whistleblower protections. On March 14, the US House of Representatives passed, 331 to 94, essential reforms to the WPA, H.R. 985, the "Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act." The bill extends protections to federal employees who work in national security, including those at the FBI and intelligence agencies, as well as to federally-funded contractors. It also protects all federal employees who disclose wrongdoing in the performance of official duties.

The bill provides federal employees and contractors with a right to jury trials in federal court to challenge reprisals. A similar bill is under consideration in the Senate, S. 274, the "Federal Employee Protection of Disclosures Act."

If the House bill were to become law, it would negate a 2006 US Supreme Court ruling that limited the rights of employee-whistleblowers. In 2006, Public Citizen argued Garcetti v. Ceballos in the Supreme Court on behalf of a Los Angeles County prosecutor, Richard Ceballos, who was retaliated against after telling his supervisors of his belief that police falsified an affidavit to obtain a search warrant. The Court ruled that the disclosure was made in the course of his official job duties, holding that he was entitled to no protection, not even his First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

"Conscientious civil servants deserve strong statutory protections - not bureaucratic intimidation," said Claybrook. "Federal employees should not have to sacrifice their careers and livelihoods to do the right thing by disclosing information to protect public health, reduce fiscal abuse or secure the nation."

Whistleblowers have a number of champions in Congress. In the Senate, the most outspoken is Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, now ranking member of the Finance Committee. Grassley has advocated on behalf of individual whistleblowers for more than 20 years and co-authored laws to empower and protect whistleblowers, including the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, the 1986 whistleblower amendments to the False Claims Act, and the 2002 whistleblower amendment to the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform legislation. Along with Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota, he has also called for the extension of whistleblower protections to staff at the World Bank, after receiving accounts of retaliation against whistleblowers.

In the House, arguably the most vocal champion of whistleblowers is Rep. Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, who is the author of the recently-passed Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.

Says Waxman, “A key component of accountability is whistleblower protection. Federal employees are on the inside. They see when taxpayer dollars are wasted. They are often the first to see the signals of corrupt or incompetent management. Yet without adequate protections, they cannot step forward to blow the whistle.”

Waxman adds, “There are many federal government workers who deserve whistleblower protection, but perhaps none more than national security officials. These are federal government employees who have undergone extensive background investigations, obtained security clearances, and handled classified information on a routine basis. Our own government has concluded that they can be trusted to work on the most sensitive law enforcement and intelligence projects. Yet these officials receive no protection when come forward to identify abuses that are undermining our national security.”

PADILLA TRIAL BEGINS THIS WEEK

By William Fisher

This week, a Florida jury is set to hear opening arguments in a trial that has come to be known as “Padilla Lite” – because it lacks the most serious charges made the government when it spectacularly announced the arrest of Jose Padilla for conspiring with al Qaeda operatives to plant radiological ''dirty bombs'' and to blow up apartment buildings in major US cities.

In June 2002, then Attorney General John Ashcroft interrupted a visit to Moscow to hold a widely publicized press conference to announce the arrest at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport of the US citizen, who was soon designated by President George W. Bush as an enemy combatant.

The Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican, who lived in the Ft. Lauderdale area, had converted to Islam a few years earlier. He was arrested by the FBI in May 2002 after returning from Pakistan. Padilla, then 31, spent the next three years locked up in military custody in a South Carolina naval brig without charges or access to lawyers. In late 2005, he was abruptly transferred to a civilian jail on the eve of a Supreme Court habeas corpus hearing that would have compelled the government to present evidence to justify his continued detention.

A former juvenile offender, Padilla converted to Islam as part of an effort to straighten out his life, say family members and friends. His mosque in Fort Lauderdale sponsored his travel, he is said to have told friends, relatives and FBI agents who interviewed him in 2002.

Following his transfer from the navy brig, Padilla, along with two co-defendants, computer programmer Adham Amin Hassoun and Detroit school administrator Kifah Wael Jayyousi, were indicted for conspiring to ''murder, kidnap and maim'' people overseas and to provide ''material support'' for terrorist activity.

Gone were the “dirty bomb” allegations against Padilla, potentially incriminating testimony from al Qaeda members detained at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Padilla's originally alleged meeting with a top
al Qaeda commander. The jury will also not be hearing anything Padilla may have told his captors during his three-year incarceration nor of his treatment during that period. Federal rules of evidence exclude material obtained before a suspect is formally charged; Padilla was not charged until he became part of the civilian justice system.

Testimony of this kind is not part of the indictment against Padilla because its admission would have opened the door for defense attorneys to challenge the credibility of prosecution witnesses, possible torture tactics, and disclosure of national security secrets.

The evidence the government will present to a dozen Miami-Dade County jurors will be in support of allegations the defendants were part of a US-based mission to carry out ''violent jihad'' overseas, including the ''Mujahideen Data Form'' Padilla is alleged to have submitted in preparation for training with al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The government’s case is based largely on hundreds of wiretapped phone conversations between Padilla and his co-defendants. Seven of these taped phone calls contain recordings of Padilla’s voice.

Each of the defendants faces life in prison if convicted. To obtain a guilty verdict, prosecutors will have to convince the jury that each defendant participated in at least one act to further the conspiracy of providing material support for Islamic extremists overseas. Padilla's alleged recruitment by his co-defendants, and his alleged al Qaeda application, might be sufficient to obtain a conviction. The three defendants have pleaded not guilty.

However, the initial “dirty bomb” charge has not vanished completely. It was lodged against one of Padilla’s alleged accomplices, an Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee, who is not part of the Miami trial and who has not yet been scheduled for trial by a military tribunal at GITMO.

And the original “dirty bomb” allegation against Padilla is a key reason jury selection took more than a month and became so contentious. Many prospective jurors said they had heard of Padilla and some connection with the purported al-Qaida plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb." Others had strong opinions about Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism that they said would make it difficult or impossible for them to be fair.

The seven men and five women jury -- five blacks, four whites and three Hispanics -- was chosen from an original jury pool of 300. Prosecutors charged that the defense was trying to exclude white and Hispanic men, who are considered more likely to convict. The defense accused the government of trying to exclude blacks, because studies have shown they frequently view criminal prosecutions with greater skepticism. The main jury includes no Muslims; the alternate juror of Egyptian descent said she was born to a Muslim family but did not practice Islam.

The indictment -- a summary of evidence gathered mostly from phone wiretaps of what the government characterizes as “coded” conversations involving Hassoun and other suspected conspirators -- paints a picture of an alleged North American cell involved in Muslim charities, an Islamic newsletter and jihad recruitment. But it cites no specific acts of violence by Padilla or other recruits.

The presiding federal judge, Marcia Cooke, has warned the prosecution team to limit references to Usama bin Laden, declaring that the Padilla case has no connection to him or his masterminding of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She also cautioned prospective jurors that the Miami indictment has nothing to do with the ''dirty bomber'' charge.

She has also excluded from evidence a seven-page summary prepared by the government, which it says is based on classified statements by Padilla and other alleged al Qaeda detainees. The summary says Padilla admitted attending the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in March 2000, when he met an al Qaeda recruiter and became interested in going to Afghanistan. It also says he admitted that ''he attended the al Qaeda-affiliated al Farouq training camp in Afghanistan in September-October 2000 under the name Abdullah al Espani.''

There, Padilla is said to have admitted receiving training in weaponry, explosives and communications. The government summary says that, about a year later, Padilla acknowledged meeting with senior al Qaeda associate Abu Zubaydah for the first time at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. During a second meeting, Padilla is alleged to have said he and an accomplice, an Ethiopian later identified as Binyam Ahmed Muhammad, “presented to Abu Zubaydah plans for an operation in which they would travel to the United States to detonate a nuclear bomb they learned to make on the Internet.''

The summary says Zubaydah ''was skeptical of the idea,'' but still sent him and his partner to Pakistan to present it to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, al Qaeda's
operations chief. It claims that Padilla and his partner met with Mohammed in March 2002 in Karachi, where Padilla presented the dirty bomb plan.

Padilla said the al Qaeda commander thought ''the idea was a little too
complicated.'' He suggested that Padilla blow up apartment buildings in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Florida, according to the government’s summary.

It alleges that ''Padilla now admits that he accepted the mission,'' and a month later, left Pakistan for Egypt, and later flew to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, where the FBI arrested him. Authorities say he was carrying $10,526 he allegedly received from al Qaeda for his apartment-bombing mission, according to the summary.

However, jurors will hear none of this because the indictment does not accuse Padilla or his co-defendants with any of these alleged crimes.

Given the original sensational allegations and the worldwide publicity they attracted, some legal experts think the Padilla trial is bound to be something of an anti-climax.

According to University of Miami law Professor Stephen Vladeck, who had filed a Supreme Court brief challenging Padilla's detention. “For what was supposed to be this grand, central case in the government's war on terror, this is going out with much more of a whimper than a bang.''

Robert Chesney, a specialist in national security law at Wake Forest University,
termed the prosecution pragmatic, analogous to “going after Al Capone on
tax evasion.”

But a spokesperson for Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group, says this will never be an ordinary, pragmatic prosecution. “If Jose Padilla were from Day 1 just charged and tried, then maybe,” she said. “But this is a case that comes after three and a half years of the most gross deprivation of human rights that we’ve seen in this country for a long time.”

She also noted that the government has reserved the option, should its case fail, of returning Mr. Padilla to military custody. This “casts a shadow” over the current prosecution, she says.

CONSUMER PROTECTION NOMINEE JOINS LONG LINE OF FLAWED BUSH APPOINTEES

By William Fisher

The nomination of a long-time manufacturers’ lobbyist to head the nation’s consumer safety watchdog agency is not only igniting fierce opposition from public interest groups, but is sparking a reexamination of the Bush Administration’s five-year history of appointing senior officials many regard as “cronies” who were inefficient, inexperienced and, in some cases, forced to resign under pressure or convicted of crimes.

According to a report released by Public Citizen, Michael Baroody, President Bush’s nominee to chair the Consumer Products Safety Commission, was the top lobbyist for the country’s most powerful industry trade association when the group supported weakening guidelines for reporting information about dangerous products.

The report charged that the “requirements that the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and its allies sought to weaken had been responsible for more than 80 percent of the fines issued by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) over the past decade. NAM’s members and its coalition partners were responsible for paying more than half of those fines.”

The CPSC is tasked with protecting the public – and especially children – from serious injury or death and monitors more than 15,000 types of consumer products. Reports about product hazards are mandated by the Consumer Product Safety Act, one of the key laws governing the CPSC’s role in protecting consumer safety.

Public Citizen says that with Baroody serving as its executive director for lobbying efforts, NAM supported a move to weaken agency protocols that dictate when companies – including NAM members – must immediately report information about potentially hazardous product defects. The changes NAM successfully pressed for could affect the agency’s ability to issue timely decisions to recall dangerous products.

“As head of the CPSC, Baroody would be in charge of administering the weakened disclosure guidance his industry association sought, presenting a serious and unavoidable conflict of interest,” said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook. “Under his authority, consumer and public safety would be at risk, while the companies he represented for years would save millions in future fines.”


Public Citizen’s analysis shows that weakening the rules had enormous financial benefits for NAM and its manufacturer members at the expense of consumer safety. Alleged violations of reporting guidelines were responsible for about $32.9 million of $39.6 million in civil fines collected by the CPSC since 1997. NAM members and affiliates accounted for more than half of those payments, totaling $18 million. Five of those companies alone paid a combined $10 million for allegedly violating reporting guidelines.

“While Baroody was at its helm, NAM had a record of unrelenting hostility to the safety of consumers, including small children,” said Laura MacCleery, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. “Baroody should not be confirmed to lead a safety agency that has such a vital role in protecting American families.”

The Baroody nomination has rekindled charges of serious ethics breaches, conflicts of interest, inefficiency, cronyism, and a number of criminal convictions among Bush political appointees since the election of 2000.

The public is by now familiar with the more high profile cases. The departure of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The conviction of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for lying to a federal grand jury in connection with the leaking of a CIA operative's identity. The conviction of David Safavian, head of all government procurement at the Office of Management and Budget, for lying to ethics officials and Senate investigators about his ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The resignation of neoconservative leader Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, who stepped down as Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board amid conflict-of-interest charges. The firing of Michael Brown, the FEMA director whose performance before, during and after Hurricane Katrina became a national scandal. And, most recently, the resignation of Monica Goodling, the Bush administration official believed to have played a pivotal role in the current contretemps over sacked prosecutors, after she invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to testify to Congress.

Less well-known to the public is the catalog of indictments or guilty pleas by lower-level Executive Branch political appointees. Here are some of them, originally compiled by Nick Turse of TPM Muckraker (www.tpmmuckraker.com), and added to by readers.

Steven Griles, Deputy Secretary at the Interior Department, who resigned and subsequently pled guilty to lying about his ties to convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Dusty Foggo, CIA Executive Director, who was indicted following accusations of corruption in connection to the Duke Cunningham scandal.

Claude Allen, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, who pled guilty to shoplifting from Target stores.

Larry Franklin, a DOD intelligence officer, who pled guilty to passing secrets to Israel.

Roger Stillwell, a desk officer at the Interior Department, who pled guilty to failing to report Redskins tickets and free dinners from Jack Abramoff.

Frank Figueroa, a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security, and former head of anti-sex-crime Operation Predator, who pled no contest to exposing himself to 16-year-old girl in Florida mall.

Darleen Druyun, a senior contracting official for the Air Force, who pled guilty and was sentenced to nine months in prison for her role in the Boeing tanker lease scandal.

John Korsmo, chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Board, who pled guilty to lying to the Senate and an inspector general about his role in a fundraiser for a friend's congressional campaign.

P. Trey Sunderland III, Chief of Geriatric Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, who admitted to a criminal conflict of interest charge for failing to report $300,000 received from Pfizer, Inc., a pharmaceutical company.

Still others have resigned in the face of pending charges or after investigations had been completed. These include:

Carl Truscott, Director of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau, who resigned after a report by the Justice Department's Inspector General found he wasted tens of thousands of dollars on luxuries, wasted millions on whimsical management decisions and violated ethics rules by ordering employees to help his nephew with a high school video project.

Joseph Schmitz, the Defense Department’s Inspector General, who resigned amid charges he personally intervened to protect top political appointees.

Susan Ralston, a White House assistant, who resigned amidst revelations she had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts from lobbyist Abramoff without compensating him, counter to White House ethics rules.

Kenneth Tomlinson, Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who resigned after the release of an inspector general’s report concluding he had broken laws in spending CPB money to hire politically connected consultants to search for "bias" without consulting the board. At BBG, a separate investigation found he was running a "horse racing operation" out of his office, and continuing to hire politically-wired individuals to do "consulting" work for him.

George Deutsch, a NASA press aide, who resigned amid allegations he prevented the agency's top climate scientist from speaking publicly about global warming.

James Roche, Secretary of the Air Force, who resigned in the wake of the Boeing tanker lease scandal, after it was revealed he had pushed for Boeing to win a $23 billion contract.

Marvin Sambur, the top contracting executive at the Air Force – Darleen Druyun's boss -- who resigned in the wake of the Boeing scandal, though further investigations cleared him of wrongdoing.

Philip Cooney, Chief of Staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and a former oil industry lawyer with no scientific expertise, who resigned after it was revealed he had watered down reports on global warming.

Thomas Scully, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who resigned following an investigation by the HHS Inspector General found he had pressured the agency's actuary to underestimate the full cost of the Medicare reform bill by approximately $100 billion until after Congress passed the bill into law.

Michelle Larson Korsmo, Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Labor, who resigned about two weeks before news broke that she and her husband were the targets of a criminal probe.

David Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks at the Interior Department, who resigned after shooting a buffalo and accepting its remains as an illegal gratuity.

Sean Tunis, Chief Medical Officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who left after the State of Maryland suspended his medical license because he faked documentation relating to his medical education.

Julie MacDonald, the Interior Department’s Assistant Secretary of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, who resigned after an Inspector General investigation concluded that she used her position to squelch protection of endangered species.

Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who resigned as Inspector General of the Health and Human Services Department after Congress began investigating her decision to delay an audit of Florida's pension fund at the request of Gov. Jeb Bush's office.

Robert E. Coughlin II, Deputy Chief of Staff for the DOJ’s criminal division, who resigned after coming under scrutiny in the Department’s expanding investigation of convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Lester Crawford, who resigned as a commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration and pleaded guilty to charges of "conflict of interest and false reporting of information about stocks he owned in food, beverage and medical device companies he was in charge of regulating.”

Army Secretary Francis Harvey, the Army's top civilian official, who resigned in the wake of the ongoing controversy about poor outpatient care of injured soldiers at Walter Reid Army Medical Center.

The nominations of a number of other Bush loyalists were withdrawn because of scandal or political opposition. For example:

Harriet Myers, a longtime Bush friend, who the president nominated to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, but later was forced to withdraw because of opposition from the religious right.

Bernard Kerik, nominated on the recommendation of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to head the Department of Homeland Security, who withdrew his nomination amidst a host of corruption allegations.

Timothy Flanigan, nominated to be Deputy Attorney General, who withdrew his nomination after revelations that he had worked closely with lobbyist Jack Abramoff when he was General Counsel for Corporate and International Law at Tyco, an Abramoff client.

Linda Chavez, nominated to become Secretary of Labor, who withdrew her nomination because of revelations that an illegal immigrant lived in her home and worked for her.

A number of other Bush nominees made it through the Senate confirmation process but remain under scrutiny by Congress because of lack of experience or ideologically-driven views.

One such is Ellen Sauerbrey, now head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, the office that coordinates the American response to migration problems caused by war and natural disasters and works with international groups on population and reproductive-health issues.

Sauerbrey’s resume includes no experience in any of these areas. She ran Bush's 2000 presidential campaign in Maryland, and twice ran for governor of that state.

Another is Julie Myers, head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose nomination was criticized by several ICE supervisors and agents who said she was "unqualified" because she never held a law-enforcement management position. Myers leads the largest investigative component of the Department of Homeland Security and the second largest investigative agency in the federal government, with more than 15,000 employees and an annual budget of nearly $5 billion. Her uncle is retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, formerly chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A third is J. Dorrance Smith, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Smith, a former ABC News producer and the former media adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, was confirmed by the Senate months after President Bush used a recess appointment to install him in the job. Objections were raised about a column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in which he suggested that US television networks engaged in “collaboration” with terrorists by airing Arab news reports on al Qaeda.

Many of the Bush Administration’s younger appointees were recruited from right-wing Christian universities, such as Patrick Henry College, whose mission is “to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding.” Others have come from Liberty University, the Christian liberal arts university founded as Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971 by televangelist Jerry Falwell.

Liberty’s law school is the alma mater of Monica Goodling, the DOJ’s White House liaison officer, who recently resigned rather than testify to Congress about her role in the firing of US attorneys. A long line of Patrick Henry graduates have found their way to internships and permanent positions in the Bush Administration, including some in the office of Karl Rove, the president’s chief political advisor.

Paul Bonicelli, a former Patrick Henry dean, is now the number two official supervising democracy-promotion programs at the US Agency for International Development.

But not all Bush appointees have been happy campers. A number have resigned. For example, John J. DiIulio Jr., the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who quit his post after only seven months on the job, and David Kuo, his deputy, who left saying that “there was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda" and that there never really was great concern over what he called "the ‘poor people stuff’."

DiIulio told Esquire Magazine, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." He also decried "a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism."

The invasion of Iraq also triggered the resignations of a number of officials who disagreed with the Bush Administration’s war policies. Among them were career Foreign Service Officers like John Brown, now a Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, and Mary A. (Ann) Wright, who now writes about US foreign policy and lectures at universities.

But the current controversy related to the forced resignations of nine US attorneys promises to add fuel to the fire caused by what many Administration-watchers describe as the most inept, ideological and politically-driven presidencies in recent US history.

Virtually every American administration has had its share of scandal. The presidencies of Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant were destroyed by the appointment of corrupt or unqualified officials.

Woodrow Wilson got rid of his attorney general, James McReynolds, by appointing him to the Supreme Court; McReynolds was a reactionary who hated his fellow Justices, Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo, for being Jewish, and is remembered as one of the worst Justices in it's history.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had to fire his top aide, Sherman Adams, for accepting a Vicuna coat from a government contractor.

One of John F. Kennedy’s assistant secretaries in the commerce Department was fired for violating the Hatch Act by soliciting campaign contributions from government employees.

Jimmy Carter appointed Bert Lance as head of his Office of Management and Budget, but Lance was forced to resign six months later amid allegations of mismanagement and corruption when Lance was Chairman of the Board of Calhoun National Bank of Calhoun, Georgia.

Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who was a serial liar on conditions in Vietnam.

Ronald Reagan had Col. Oliver North, Adm. John Pointdexter and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the lead roles of Iran-Contra.
Richard Nixon appointed the arrogant sycophants whose amoral hubris resulted in Watergate.

And Bill Clinton appointed many Arkansas cronies, including Webster Hubbell as his Deputy Attorney General, only to have him assert his Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress, but later plead guilty to several felony charges relating to illegal billing in the Whitewater affair.

But critics of the Bush Administration assert that its “appointments deficit” extends wider and deeper than that of any other modern presidency. They contend that, of the 3,000-plus political jobs a president can offer, an exponentially larger proportion of Bush appointees lack the specialized experience they require, are managerially inept and ideologically-driven, have contempt for career civil servants, and regularly sacrifice good governance ethics for personal gain or to curry favor among Bush supporters, especially the Religious Right.